A paper presenting significant results in particle physics has been published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. An international team of researchers working within the CMS experiment at CERN has, for the first time, determined the spin and parity properties of tetraquarks composed exclusively of charm quarks – among the most complex known multiquark states studied in contemporary particle physics.
Among the co-authors of the publication are Maciej Malawski DSc and Leszek Grzanka, PhD from AGH University of Krakow. Their contributions focused on scientific software development, large-scale data analysis, and distributed computing environments essential for processing data from high-energy physics experiments.
The experimental data used in the study were collected between 2016 and 2018. Already at that time, the AGH team had an established collaboration with the CMS experiment through the CT-PPS project, carried out jointly with the TOTEM experiment. Since 2018, AGH has been a full member of the CMS collaboration.
While the analysis did not use data from scattered protons recorded by detectors developed by the AGH group, it relied heavily on software to which the team has made a substantial and long-term contribution. The paper explicitly cites the CMS core software, including algorithms for data reconstruction, detector calibration, and accelerator optics modeling. Data analysis was performed using the ROOT framework developed at CERN, to which AGH researchers contributed solutions enabling parallel and interactive data analysis.
The CMS experiment generates enormous volumes of data, which are processed and stored at the Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet AGH. Advanced computing infrastructure and IT solutions play a crucial role in enabling the analysis of such complex physical phenomena.
A significant portion of the work – particularly engineering and software-related tasks –was carried out by highly talented AGH students. These foundational projects were essential to ensuring the collection of sufficient high-quality experimental data, making publications of this caliber possible.
The results represent an important step toward a deeper understanding of complex quark states and demonstrate that modern breakthroughs in particle physics are inseparable from advanced computing technologies, which also find applications beyond physics, including medicine and bioinformatics.
Sources:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09711-7
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